Fukagawa Edo Museum

Walk into the exhibition hall and you come out on a street in Fukagawa Saga-cho around the Tenpo era, the 1830s and early 1840s, built at full size in an atrium that rises three floors from the basement. There is a big fertilizer wholesaler with white-walled storehouses, two boatmen's inns on a canal with a narrow choki boat moored in it, a fire lookout tower above a small square, a tempura stand and a soba stall. Duck through the wooden gate between the greengrocer and the rice polisher and you are in the back-alley tenements, with a shared well, a toilet and a small Inari shrine. The curators decided who lives in each room, down to their jobs, ages and family, and stocked them to match: a sawyer from the Kiba timber yards has his saws and two meal trays, his wife's make-up box beside them. You can step up into the rooms yourself. Lighting and sound run through a full day, from dawn to dusk. Opened in 1986, the museum is run by Koto City, so it is cheap at 400 yen, but it closes on the 2nd and 4th Mondays, which catches people out. Kiyosumi Gardens is three minutes away.